AHRQ Rewards Innovation in Social Determinants Data Visualization, Announces New Care Transitions Challenge Competition

Press Release Date: February 11, 2020

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) today announced that Mathematica was the grand prize winner of the Agency’s Visualization Resources of Community Health-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge for its “Community Connector” data visualization tool. The grand prize comes with a $50,000 award.

AHRQ Director Gopal Khanna, M.B.A., made the announcement at AcademyHealth’s annual Health Datapalooza conference in Washington, D.C. Salish Research Group was named the runner up and will receive $35,000, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was named third-place finisher and will receive $15,000.

"While data offer us new ways of understanding our world, it can be challenging for communities to make sense of torrents of data streams. Innovations in data visualization, such as the Community Connector tool, turn data into a guiding compass," Khanna said. "Together, data, analytics, and visualization will help deliver 21st century healthcare for patients and evidence-based health policy for communities."

Mathematica’s winning Community Connector tool is designed to help local community members and policy makers understand how social determinants of health are associated with health outcomes in their regions and foster collaboration among counties in areas such as peer-to-peer learning, sharing of best practices, and effective interventions.

AHRQ intends to use the data visualization innovations produced as part of this challenge as it considers new ways of presenting the Agency’s data sets and analytic tools to the public.

Khanna also announced a new AHRQ challenge competition focused on digital solutions to support patients, families, and health professionals in managing transitions from hospital to home. This new challenge competition has a total prize pool of $175,000. Submissions are due by April 6, 2020, and can be submitted at www.ahrq.gov/MCCtransitions-challenge.

In this new competition, AHRQ is seeking applications proposing personalized, high-tech ways to ease administrative and information management burdens and support patient activation and engagement, especially among Americans diagnosed with multiple chronic conditions and those that may have low health literacy or limited English language proficiency.

AHRQ’s challenge competitions are part of the Agency’s ongoing effort to help shape the Nation’s digital health care ecosystem and realize its potential to improve outcomes through broader and better use of healthcare data. The competitions also demonstrate AHRQ’s drive to harness the power of innovation and engage the private sector in ways that benefit patients everywhere.

More details about the Visualization Resources of Community Health-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge, including information about the second- and third-place winners, can be found on the SDoH challenge web site. Additional information about the new Digital Solutions to Support Care Transitions Challenge is available here.

AHRQ, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is the Nation’s lead health services research and patient safety agency. Its mission is to produce evidence to make healthcare safer, higher quality, more accessible, equitable, and affordable, and to work within HHS and with other partners to make sure that the evidence is understood and used. More information about the Agency can be found at www.ahrq.gov.

Editor's note: To learn more, access an AHRQ Views blog post by AHRQ Director Gopal Khanna as well as videos on the Visualization Resources of Community Health-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge and the Digital Solutions to Support Care Transitions Challenge .